The Effectiveness of NUL Programmes in Creating the Social Responsibility
Abstract
The employer’s views have been sought on the quality of the National University of Lesotho (NUL) programmes in relation to addressing the concept of social responsibility. The employers’ views were sought through observing the quality of performance of the NUL graduates at the workplace and at the community engagements. The NUL designed programmes that are expected to address the societal needs, hence the reason why it is important to find out whether the programmes that prepared the graduates for the workplace have a successful outcome.
A total of 150 employers in the Lesotho Ministries of Education and Training as well as Local Government and chieftainship in three of the ten districts of Lesotho formed the sample of the study. A two part questionnaire with four point likert scale of strongly agree and strongly disagree; highly satisfied and highly dissatisfied was designed to find out information on the employers’ perceptions on the performance of the NUL graduates in relation to social responsibility. Frequency counts analysis with descriptive statistics was employed to indicate the results of the study. Research results confirmed that the NUL programmes have deficiencies in moulding all graduates with competence in social responsibility. It was observed that there were graduates that have achieved the social responsibility skills, but there are those graduates who still require further training on the issue of social responsibility. It is therefore recommended that the NUL should periodically review its programmes in order to prepare a well rounded graduate that could be a community developer.
References
Bokhari, A. A. H. (2017). Universities social responsibility and sustainable development: A conceptual framework. SSRG International Journal of Economic and Management Studies, 4(12), 8-16. https://doi.org/10.14445/23939125/IJEMS-V4I12P102
Clark, B. R. (2004). Sustaining change in universities – continuities in case studies and concepts. Society for research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Dahan, G., & Senol, I. (2012). Corporate social responsibility in higher education institutions: Instabul Bilgi University case. American Journal of Contemporary Research, 2(3), 95-103.
Favish, I. (2005). Portraits of practice: Social responsiveness in teaching and research at the University of Cape Town. https://doi.org/10.5130/ijcre.v2i0.1159
Gruiffe’, L., & Ratto, S. (2014). A new paradigm in higher education: University social responsibility (USR). Journal of Education and Human Development, 3(1), 231-238.
Jongbloed, B., Enders, J., & Salern, C. (2008). Higher education and its communities: Interconnections, Interdependencies and research agenda. Higher Education, 56(3), 303-324. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-008-9128-2
Maliyamkono, T. L., Shutri, A. G. M., & Wells, S. S. (1982). Higher Education and Development in Eastern Africa. Heinemann.
Mohamed, A. T. E. (2015). A framework for university social responsibility and sustainability: The case of South Valley University, Egypt. International Journal of Social, Behavioural, Educational, Economic, Business, and Industrial Engineering, 9(7), 2393-2402.
Sekaran, U., & Bougie, R. (2013). Research Methods for business. Italy: John Wiley and sons Ltd.
Tong, T. M. (2017). Promoting social responsibility among students should be key to University mission in Young Universities Summit 2017: Higher Education must promote social responsibility.
UNESCO. (1995). World Declaration on higher education for twenty-first century vision and action. World Conference on higher education. UNESCO.
University of Cape Town. (2008). Social Responsiveness document. Retrieved 7/18/2008 from http://ww.uct.ac.za/about/introsocialresponses.
Watson, D. (2004). Inventory tool for higher education civic engagement. Retrieved 9/6/2019 from http://www.tufts.Edu/talloiresnetwork/downloads/inventorytoolhighered.civicengagement.pdf
Weiss, B. (2016). The rise of social responsibility in higher education in university world news. University world news. The global window on higher education. Retrieved from http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.Php?story=20160811095808959
Wigmore - Alvarez, A., & Lozano, M. R. (2012). University Social responsibility USR in the global context: An overview of literature. Business and Professional Ethics Journal, 31(3-4), 475-498. https://doi.org/10.5840/bpej2012313/424
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
